PrintGrand Revisions
A closer look at the Saint Louis Art Museum’s long-awaited expansion
Image courtsey of the St. Louis Art Museum
When Saint Louis Art Museum director Brent Benjamin calls his institution “the beating heart of the city,” it’s no exaggeration. You can’t overstate the hold the World’s Fair still has on St. Louis, and as one of its last standing buildings, Cass Gilbert’s Palace of Fine Arts is the container for that nostalgia. In other words, the whole city is watching. So the museum spent years doing studies, raising funds, vetting architecture firms, and hosting public input sessions—and once that was done, they hunkered down for a year after the crash of 2008. The shovels finally hit the dirt January 19; by February, there was already a substantial hole where the 300-space underground parking garage will go.
Aboveground, London-based architect David Chipperfield’s understated, 200,000-square-foot addition will soon take shape. Seated on a grassy plinth to mirror the siting of Gilbert’s building, the addition will be unabashedly modern, clad in dark, polished concrete aggregate tiles (made from Missouri river stone) each measuring 22 feet by 40 feet. Beaux-Arts pavilion it is not. Benjamin acknowledges some are upset about the choice to go contemporary and dark, but he believes once people see the building, they will understand the wisdom of Chipperfield’s vision.
Click here to see SLM’s slideshow of additional expansion images.
“Instead of being made up of smallish panels, this is made up of massive, monumental panels, appropriate to a public building that will be here for a century more—one that will have a relationship to Cass Gilbert in terms of its scale,” Benjamin says. “The thought was to take a more refined approach to concrete… It’s smooth and flat and refined in its surface, and actually a bit reflective, which will reflect the sky and the grass and the trees and the park, and really begin to integrate the building.” Gilbert’s building, Benjamin adds, is “a very 19th-century, French approach to setting a building. And this will have a much more organic feel. You will have a sense of it sitting among the trees.”
Working in tandem with David Chipperfield Architects (the design architect) and HOK (the architect of record), the museum has spent five years tweaking every minute detail of the $130.5 million expansion. The “glue” during this process was Eric Hoffman, HOK senior design technician, and Julie Bauer, project architect with David Chipperfield. Both had to be present at every meeting that’s taken place over the past five years. (“I have a lot of stamps in my passport!” Bauer says, laughing.) Two and a half years ago, the museum built a secret prototype gallery off-site, where the design team fooled around with various cement mixtures, floor stains, and lighting scrims for the “light spreaders,” skylights that will, along with floor-to-ceiling windows, flood the galleries with natural light. Viewing the art will be a dynamic experience—it will change its look as the light changes.
“The whole materiality is so key,” Bauer says. “We’ve brought in contractors from the very beginning, hired experts in each one of these fields. We’ve had to become experts in each one of these fields. And you have to test it. It’s not something you can just think about.”
Hoffman adds: “There’s always refining going on; now that we have a contractor involved”—St. Louis–based Tarlton Corporation and KAI Design & Build, as well as Pepper Construction Group out of Chicago—“we are working with the specific people building the building, who might not have been the people who helped us with the mockups, so there is a little bit of an education process that’s always going on.”
The new gallery wings, which will have a light, bright, loftlike feel, will show postwar art. Since much of that work is in the existing building, SLAM is using this as an opportunity to reconsider all of its galleries. And because the construction area’s still riddled with cranes and Bobcats, not too much has been said at this point about the other spectacular piece of this project—the landscaping, which will be done by Paris-based landscape architect Michel Desvigne. His recent projects include the much-ballyhooed Dallas Center for the Performing Arts (with Norman Foster and REX/OMA), and his work will give SLAM the opportunity to create an outdoor sculpture garden.
With 30 percent more space, the museum will also be pulling things out of storage for display in the indoor galleries, as well as giving the existing structure a new look and feel. (This will include changes to the Murphy & Mackey–designed auditorium, circa 1960.) Because SLAM has made the decision to create a very visible, albeit subtle, expansion building, there are new opportunities to correct problems with flow and parking. Features of the new building will include a central staircase connecting the main and lower levels and a new restaurant that overlooks Forest Park. But ultimately, Chipperfield’s building is truly an addition.
“He was so thoughtful about this, and understood immediately the place of the museum in St. Louis, and how important it is as a resource, but also this mythical place that the building has in our sense of self and our sense of place,” Benjamin says of Chipperfield. “And he had the sensitivity of knowing that the Sculpture Hall must remain the center of the building, not just conceptually but physically. I don’t want to move the center of gravity of this building. It needs to be the Sculpture Hall. As you look at the plans, you can see how he’s done that.”
The Saint Louis Art Museum remains open during construction; a scale model of the expansion is on view in the Sculpture Hall.
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